I knew the personal viewers were a good starting point for VR, but I had no idea that Sony literally used them as a starting point, or that Sony started as early as 2010. A lot of people mistakenly think Sony only started trying anything with VR after Oculus Rift. How long they’ve been working on it shows a lot of commitment.

There’s something important to be said about their talk of using VR in social ways, and comparison to Oculus Rift with Facebook. Zuckerberg’s remarks went into the idea of things like going to a movie theater or a basketball game, and one of the presenters of the Sony presentation (I forget his name) mentioned use of VR for looking through a hotel before choosing to stay there. A little more practical.

It’s also, I think, a suggestion that would’ve received a lot more animosity if it came from Facebook, and I think there are two reasons it looks more like a promising idea going through Sony. One is that at least so far, Sony isn’t willing to gather certain user data and shell it out to people, which assuages worries that Sony would consider gathering and selling userdata of what the user looked at. The second reason is that unlike Facebook, Sony has a strong and solid foundation in video games, and they did a damn good job of establishing their support for video games with the PS4 launch. This lets a lot of people feel optimistic that Sony will be focusing first and foremost on allowing to let people actually get involved in virtual worlds, rather than the expectation set forth with Facebook (including Zuckerberg’s own words) that VR would have a strong focus on encouraging laziness and isolation by recreating things you can do already, like go see a movie in a theater.

It’ll be interesting to see how things go from here. Sony is probably the company best positioned for working on VR, given their line of products, interests and history. After all, Sony was already looking into this before it became the “next big thing,” which shows commitment. After Sony, it’s kind of a toss-up between whether Apple or Microsoft would next best